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[Phys-L] Re: Light from fireball visible?



At 20:54 -0600 2/9/06, Jack Uretsky wrote:

The fireball is far from symmetrical, vertically, about its
detonation point. Your estimate of the fireball height would seem to be
flawed.

Probably, but what I did was intended only as a crude estimate. The
pictures of fireballs that I have seen (there are lots of them on the
web) all look reasonably symmetric, and if anything flattened on the
horizontal plane. BC's numbers indicate that, if anything, my
estimate is likely to be too high, which makes the conclusion that
the fireball couldn't have been seen from Shanghai even more likely.
I don't know how high the cloud rose over Nagasaki, but I have read
that it wasn't as well-defined as the more classic shapes that we
have seen from the test pictures, due to various levels of wind-shear
at altitude, so it is possible that the cloud could have been seen
(they have been measured to rise to 50,000-60,000 ft, sometimes more,
depending on local atmospheric conditions), but it might have been so
ill-defined by then that it wouldn't have been identified as anything
unusual.

Hugh
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Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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